Monthly Archives: July 2012

For several months I have been involved in the “Puttytribe,” an online resource and community for “scanners,” or people who have multiple life interests they want to pursue and can’t settle on just one path. What may sound like a nerdy online group has been a godsend for me, being a scanner/multipod myself, it’s so great to have resources, advice, and support from like-minded people.

Last Sunday I met up with Karean, a fellow Socal constituent of the Puttytribe. We had a great lunch at Simplethings on 3rd street (AMAZING pulled chicken sandwiches and a wonderful assortment of pies– one of my favorite lunch places in this area) and talked about how difficult it is when you like to do so many things. I mean, I’ve got four different day jobs, an acting career, a play-reading group, a relationship, this blog I’m starting, and interests in food, ballet, singing, and international education that I want to be spending more time on. I don’t have enough time in the day to jam all these things together! Someday (soon!) I’m going to figure out how to take my four day jobs out of the equation so I can focus on all the other things.

Karean told me about her wonderfully long list of past jobs and how she finally ended up in real estate after working in the restaurant industry for a long time. (Contact her if you’re thinking about purchasing a home!) It made me feel better about having had so many different, random jobs in the past. She wants to get more into writing and I hope I can help hold her accountable for that! Karean, if you ever write a play we’ll do it at Theatre Jams! 😉

I find it interesting that a common factor in multipotentialite/scanner personalities is the desire to help others through their work and being in some way artistically inclined. From what I’ve observed so far, everyone in the group has those qualities and want to incorporate those aspects into their life’s work. I wonder what that means about us as personality types. I would love to hear others’ thoughts on that.

Seeing that she and I were the only ones out of a group of about ten people who showed interest in this lunch, we also discussed the difficulty of getting people to show up to things, especially in Southern California. I’ve always had such trouble getting people to commit to attending performances, events, birthday parties, anything. It’s exhausting, and it gets very hard not to take anything personally, not to mention the difficulty of creating momentum for my audience-reliant artistic endeavors. There are so many excuses… It’ll be too hard to find parking, Traffic will be really bad, I won’t know anyone there, It might be stupid, I’d rather stay and finish this episode of SVU, etc. I have to admit that I do fall victim to those negative voices, myself, and I wish I could find a magical marketing trick to activate people. I’m always asking people what would get them to go see a play, or what would get them to come to Theatre Jams (as delicious as it is, my free food is apparently not enough!).

Karean says that you need to decide for yourself to get those negative voices to go away, because sometimes when you say yes to an opportunity, you end up getting something amazing out of it. No matter how many negative voices there are, I know if I can make myself say “yes” to things more often, I’ll have the chance of getting to meet great people like Karean and working my way towards finding that ideal scanner lifestyle.